


Parables of Wheat

by Mothsonfire



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Body Horror, Death becomes even more complicated when you have resurrection rituals, Gen, Someone hug the cleric please, Suicide, this is honestly more philosophical than grim dark I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:21:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21793669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mothsonfire/pseuds/Mothsonfire
Summary: The Clays kept a graveyard. Death is a commodity.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 62





	Parables of Wheat

Caduceus is already unconscious when the explosion has been created (he uses the passive voice sometimes, sometimes that verb is active) and he is killed. He never asks the others what happens, exactly, in part because they never bring it up, but he woke up from his vision of the forge in a different part of the cave then he passed out in. His body had been thrown. His limbs are positioned awkwardly.

He wonders briefly how many of them had been broken before His Mother’s intervention, but shies away from the thought of his body misshapen. He remembers the way his mother looked at him after he pierced his ear, with frustration and disappointment and a little anger, at the way he had spit on the body given to him by his Mothers. He had blamed the decision on his sister, and his mother had believed him.

Over the coming days, when the group finally rests, he takes out his tunic and his jacket and slowly starts to sew the holes closed, and wash out the blood stains. He can never remove some of the scorch marks and cannot repair the jagged hole he is pretty sure was caused by his own femur. He buys a new jacket and thinks on the vision.  
  
This is not his first vision. This is not his first death.  
  
His first death had been ritualistic, intentional, and a suicide, though a short-lived one. The Bone Orchard had been kitted out for a feast of which he would not partake. Caduceus had been somewhat grateful for that, as his siblings’ cooking had always left something to be desired, not like his mother’s.

He had gone into the forest on the third day of his fast, and had gathered the Blue Tongue and the Hemlock and the Bellweed. He had noted the encroaching darkness of the woods, how the boundaries of the Clay’s protection had shrunk yet more from the last time he had made this walk. He returned to his home and he bathed in the cool water and he dressed in white. He told his oldest sister his preferences for how to treat his body and entomb him, both because it was tradition and because sometimes, no matter how correctly the spell had been cast, it still failed. His preferences were the same as the rest of his family, he would not break from tradition.

He laid down on the bier prepared for him next to his father’s grave, the woven basket for his body, and smelled the Ash and Sweetgreen and Birch. He drank his tea and he died. He had seen a stretch of Mountains and then the deep deep sea, and had a vague thought of the East. He woke to his sister holding one of the family diamonds, now dust, over him, watching him calmly. He told his family what he had seen, and watched his sister start to prepare for a journey, like his mother had, and his aunt. She promised to Send them messages, but she never did.  
  
The Clays kept a graveyard. Death is a commodity, a good to be traded with and bartered. Sometimes the Clays traded death for diamonds, sometimes for purpose. They did not see a great difference.  
  
Caduceus knows that it makes no sense to heal himself. A cleric of the grave is tasked with two jobs; to keep people and monsters on the correct side of death when they threaten to cross the boundary line, and to straddle that line themselves. Caduceus senses the undead, those that spit on the important boundary, and can rot the bodies of those beyond his saving, so that they don’t return as abominations. His healing is at its best when an ally knocks on the door to the other side, he can force more vitality into them than he otherwise could. He cannot do this for himself, and it would be a waste of a useful death in any case. Caduceus learns more of his quest when he dies. His Mother sees his efforts and approves when he dies. His death is needed, in some ways, more than his life. But he remembers the way his mother looked at his pierced ear, and knows not to chase it. His life was a gift, and one does not scorn a gift.

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t write, like, ever. But I couldn’t get some of this out of my head, like how Cad never heals himself, his feelings of abandonment, and the contradiction of purity ideals (“my family disapproves of tattoos”) and the entire concept of grave clerics. It’s more of a rumination than anything, and has no ending but *shrugs*.


End file.
